1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to a system for producing valuable metals from materials containing trace amounts of those valuable metals. In particular, the present invention relates to a system for producing noble metals such as gold, platinum, palladium, and silver from low-grade ore material.
2. Background
There are several ways to retrieve or mine metals from ore. As is well known in the art, mining has historically consisted of hard-rock, open pit, or placer deposit methods. Generally, in the case of hard-rock mining, or open pit mining, higher-grade materials are selected for processing by grinding and concentrating metal-bearing ore. Concentration may be accomplished by floatation, chemical leach, or gravity separation such as sluicing. The rejected materials, or the materials that are left after concentration, are generally placed in tailing piles that are then just left at the mine or mill site. The tailing piles will often still contain small amounts of the desired metals but are nevertheless considered unprofitable to work with further.
The concentrated materials may be further processed by smelting them into the form of a metal bar or cell. Smelting involves heating the concentrated materials with suitable fluxes to the melting point of the metals. The metals are then poured into molds, and the waste material is carried in the flux that comes off in a slag. Heating has been accomplished by a variety of methods such as by gas fire, coke fire, carbon arc, and induction heatingxe2x80x94all of which are familiar to those who practice the art.
Besides methods for retrieving or mining metals, there also exist some methods for processing low-grade ore materials (such as that found in tailing piles) that purport to produce more amounts of the desired metals than were originally present in the ore materials. For example, one method produces metals from heavy magnetic black sands that are often recovered with gold from dredging or sluicing operations. First, the finely ground sands are mixed with flour or whole wheat, finely divided (powdered) silver, and potassium nitrate. This mixture is placed in a container or barrel of, for example, a fifty-gallon capacity, and then set on fire so that the mixture burns slowly until all combustion is complete. The mixture is then smelted, along with a soda ash and borax flux (borax being an ore of the element boron), in a silicon carbide crucible placed within a furnace fired by natural gas. The metal obtained from the smelting operation is then parted in an electrolytic silver cell, according to known standard procedures for such separation, and the slimes are then analyzed for noble metals other than silver. This process does not consistently produce significant amounts of the desired metals, however, and thus has been abandoned as commercially useless.
Other methods exist for processing low-grade ore materials such that a greater amount of the desired metals are purportedly produced than were originally present in the ore materials. For example, one such method involves the use of induction furnaces to repeatedly heat a mixture of ore particles and flour. This method is careful to provide an oxygen-free environment within the furnace so that the process of creating the desired metals is not reversed.
The present invention may generally be characterized as a process or system for producing quantities of noble metals. The process basically begins with obtaining a feed material containing small amounts of noble metals, mixing the feed material (preferably in a ground or particulate form) with a base metal such as copper and with activated carbon such as charcoal briquettes, and exposing the mixture to a reaction environment that results in the production of significantly greater quantities of noble metals, or other types of valuable metals, than were originally present in the feed.
The reaction environment includes a non-conducting container placed within a combustion chamber and surrounded by a double-wire, coiled transmission line. xe2x80x9cCollision pairs,xe2x80x9d comprising pairs of electrical pulses having equal amplitudes and opposing directions (in other words, each pair comprises a positive pulse and a negative pulse), are repeatedly applied to each end of the transmission line so that the opposing pulses collide within the transmission line and that the collision points travel in a sweeping motion along the length of the transmission line.
Additional positive-negative pulse pairs, herein called xe2x80x9cfrequency pairs,xe2x80x9d are sent in multi-chord pulse trains that form a chord having multiple, specific frequencies ranging preferably between 5000 to 7000 cycles per second. These multi-frequency pulse trains are repeated over and over, thus sustaining a multi-frequency chord that exposes the mixture within the container to a multi-frequency magnetic field. The timing of the frequency pairs is preferably controlled by digital signal processing filters that are able to precisely maintain the individual frequencies of the chord by using input from current and voltage sensors in the transmission line.
The collision and frequency pulse pairs are repeatedly applied to the transmission line until the desired amount of metal is produced. In the preferred embodiments, heat is also applied to the mixture in order to facilitate the production of metals.
Accordingly, it is an object of some embodiments of the present invention to provide a commercially valuable process whereby valuable metals are produced from low-grade ore material.
It is another object of some embodiments of the present invention to provide a process for producing noble metals wherein a mixture of activated carbon, a base metal, and feed material containing trace amounts of the desired noble metals are exposed to electrodynamic fields created by a series of electrical pulses that travel along conducting lines surrounding the mixture.
It is yet another object of some embodiments of the present invention to provide a process for producing noble metals wherein a mixture of low-grade ore, carbon, and copper are exposed to a combination of gas heat and of electrodynamic fields that vary at multiple, pre-determined frequencies.
Another object of some embodiments of the present invention is to provide a non-conducting container surrounded by a double-wire, coiled transmission line wherein the container is designed to hold low-grade ore materials, and the transmission line carries repeated electrical pulse collisions and multi-frequency pulses that travel along the transmission line.